Imperial Hollywood In the '40s, epochal grandeur and wrongheadedness

They don't make tinsel the way they used to, which may be progress but also may not. Hollywood in the 1940s, the last imperial decade of the movie industry, was a dream factory, a sausage machine, a gloriously successful trade conspiracy (till the feds made the studios sell their captive theater chains). It was, for wowsers who cared to moralize, a creepy metaphor of the American soul. Ignorance ruled. Bad taste feasted; genius writhed. Or so genius said. Oddly, though not many superior films were produced, quite a few good flicks got made.